It is traditionally said that after the Lord Mayor’s Parade come the guys with brooms and shovels to clear the pavement of whatever the parade horses may have bestowed upon it. Well, the election’s over, and here I come with broom and shovel to see if there’s anything instructive to be found in the droppings.... Read More

This year marks the centenary of British mathematician Alan Turing, whose researches in the unlikely and very abstruse field of mathematical logic did much to create the world in which we now live. In 1936 Turing published a paper titled "On Computable Numbers" in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The paper received almost... Read More

"In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious." This quip was heard around Central Europe in the closing days of both world wars, but certainly predates 1918. Political Scientist Paul Gottfried, my go-to guy on matters Mitteleuropäisch, thinks it originated with one of the late-Hapsburg... Read More

Here is a story from World War Two. The place is the island of Crete; the date, May of 1941. The Wehrmacht was busily occupying Greece. The British expeditionary force in that country, overwhelmed, was being evacuated. Some of the Allied troops were moved to Crete, to fortify the rudimentary defenses of the place. They... Read More

The first thing I saw on entering the atrium of the Guggenheim was a horse suspended in a sling ten feet above the ground. The sling went under the belly of the beast (as it were), leaving its head, legs, and tail drooping down dolefully. A great many other things were also suspended from the... Read More

I have just spent a week in Moscow with Mrs. Straggler at the invitation of a Russian foundation. Neither of us had been in Russia before. It was a working trip, with very little time for sightseeing, and that only in central Moscow. It was, though, in a perfunctory way, an opportunity to compare the... Read More

In this, his most ambitious book to date, Steven Pinker describes, and attempts to explain, a curious historical phenomenon: the decline in all kinds of violence among human beings, from pre-civilized times to the present. The first thing one wants to ask is: Has there actually been such a decline? Given the tremendous wars and... Read More

"Should I read Thomas Mann?" Miss Straggler wanted to know. She has enrolled in some sort of freshman Western Lit. course at college, and keeps coming up with these questions. What to say? I have never, to my knowledge, read a single word Thomas Mann ever wrote, though I did sit through that sappy Dirk... Read More

Thus the founder of this magazine, writing in these pages, issue dated November 19, 1955. Bill Buckley was famously a man of many, many words. He had, I mean, more words at his disposal — there in his head, ready to use — than most of us have. That "supererogation" is characteristic. Bill used the... Read More

We do ever more of our shopping online, I am told. The printed book is facing extinction, I am also told. The U.S. Postal Service is in dire straits, I am further told. Taken together, these facts imply, along of course with much else, that the big, printed, mail-delivered store catalog may soon be at... Read More

Also shoes, skirts, dresses, blouses, lingerie, jeans, and sportswear. Jewelry, too; fine leather and luggage; housewares and home furnishings. Kipling's soldier didn't know the 'alf — sorry, half — of it. We had been visiting with friends in upstate New York. Now we were driving home. The first hundred miles was delightful: lovely scenery, clear... Read More

The newspaper, in the sense of news actually printed on actual paper, is clearly in its last days. The content of a newspaper can be delivered online at far lower cost than is required by investment in printing plants and equipment, fleets of delivery vans, labor, paper, and ink. With fewer people buying the paper... Read More

There has never been a good time to be an honest writer in Communist China, but the present is an exceptionally bad time. Spooked by the "Arab Spring" and jostling for position in next year's scheduled leadership changes, the Party bosses have been coming down hard on every kind of independent thinking. The cases of... Read More

Miss Straggler, just graduated from high school and with time on her hands, came home the other day with two boxes of second-hand books on the back seat of the car. "Found them outside Book Revue," she explained, naming the local independent bookstore. "There was a sign saying to please take them." The books were... Read More

It is always fun to gather first impressions of a foreign country. Turkey is, John O'Sullivan had explained to me, "upper-tier Third World." That seems about right. The Third World-itude exhibits itself at once in the streets. The Turks' own quip about their driving skills is: "In other countries people die by accident; here in... Read More

Winter conducted a fighting retreat this year, one last storm bringing down our cable service. That left us without TV, Internet, or house phones. When we signed up for this threefold package a couple of years ago, Mrs. Straggler observed that we should soon be getting our food and water from the cable-service provider. With... Read More

I used to attend regularly at an office of the New York City government to transact some business with a very pleasant young female African American city employee. On the wall of her office was a poster listing, in quite small print, all the scores of inventions and discoveries that, according to the poster, African... Read More

There is a school of psychology called Situationism that pooh-poohs the notion of individual character. This line of thought began with some experiments by Stanley Milgram of Yale University in the early 1960s. By manipulating his test subjects' conformism and respect for authority, Milgram was able to get ordinary pleasant people to give near-lethal 450-volt... Read More

If the proper study of mankind is man, it has taken a remarkably long time to get that study on a truly scientific footing. From the founding of the Royal Society to the present has been more than 350 years, yet only in the last 50 of those years have quantified, replicable results about human... Read More

It starts! January 20th, the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inauguration, passed with little comment, so far as I could judge. Then the public-sector unions of Wisconsin began demonstrating against Governor Walker's bill to cut back their collective-bargaining powers. Propagandists for the unions were keen to remind us that it was John F. Kennedy... Read More

Until very recently the only thing I knew how to say in Turkish was the proverb Nerede çokluk, orada bokluk, which means (I shall bowdlerize slightly) "Where there are people, there is dung." I had learned this by the most random kind of chance. Many years ago I was living in a rooming house in... Read More

Amy Chua, who is a law professor at Yale University, has a new book out: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The book describes the parenting methods Professor Chua employed when raising her two daughters, now aged 18 and 14. An extract published in the January 8 Wall Street Journal caused a small sensation. Within... Read More

One of our township's very few claims to fame, perhaps the only one, arises from its cesspools. The Wikipedia article headed "cesspool" devotes an entire paragraph to Huntington. In numbers of people sucked down into collapsing old cesspools, we lead the nation. There were three deaths just this past decade. The Straggler family avoided this... Read More

The other day I stepped into an elevator while wearing a hat. Seeing ladies in the elevator, I removed my hat. One of the ladies, who was of a certain age, complimented me on my manners. "Not many men would know to do that nowadays." Not many men need to. As someone or other has... Read More

Scowling out at me from my New York Post is Steven Hayes, recently convicted in an exceptionally vile crime in my neighbor state of Connecticut. With another man, not yet tried, Hayes invaded a family home, clubbed the father senseless, then raped, tortured, strangled, and burned alive the wife and two daughters. He has been... Read More

What a place it is, this world we humans have made! It has such variety, such abundance of skills and knowledge, so many aspects one never thinks of from one year's end to the next till they are suddenly forced on one's attention. Consider, for example, glass. Over the past three or four years, windows... Read More

The Tyler Clementi case has been illuminating in several respects. Clementi was a freshman student at Rutgers University, sharing a dorm room with another 18-year-old, Dharun Ravi. Clementi asked for sole use of the room until midnight on September 19. Ravi obliged and went to his girlfriend's room, but not before activating his webcam. With... Read More

The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." Both... Read More

August lived up to its reputation as the Silly Season this year, the news dominated for several days by JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who quit his job August 9 in a sensational manner, venting his grievances over the plane's PA system then exiting via the emergency chute. (Fortunately the plane was stationary on the... Read More

In the way these things happen, we had a sudden deluge of education stories this past few days. For this Long Islander the news was both local, state, and national. Our local news concerned a school district referendum on spending $2m to add buildings to our intermediate school (grades 4-6). The backstory here is that... Read More

The recent political ructions over the extension of unemployment benefit brought Norman Tebbit to my mind. Tebbit was Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State for Employment in the early 1980s. There was some urban rioting, and it was suggested to Tebbit that these disturbances were a natural response to the indignity of unemployment. Tebbit, whose origins... Read More

For some time I had wanted to meet James Buckley, fourth of the ten in his generation. (Bill Buckley was sixth.) This man had an extraordinary career. He served at a high level in all three branches of the federal government: as a U.S. senator, as an undersecretary of state, and as a federal appeals... Read More

In the dismaying-but-not-surprising category of news stories recently, this one in the July 2 New York Times got my attention. It describes how the Obama administration is killing off the summer internship programs, many of them unpaid, that are so popular with high school seniors and college students. Sample quotes: One reason this got my... Read More

The first federal regulator I ever knew was a fellow named Ernie. This was 40 years ago, a few weeks after I'd first landed on these shores. I'd run out of money and taken work as kitchen help at a small family firm in New Rochelle, New York. The firm made frozen kosher TV dinners.... Read More

Fleet Week! For a few days the rather distinctly un-military inhabitants of New York City find that in hurrying from one commercial deal to another, one fashion show to another, one dinner party to another, one charity fundraiser, poetry slam, book-launch party, gallery show, clubbing excursion, coffee-klatch, or private debauch to another, they are sharing... Read More

Front page headline in my New York Post this morning: The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: "A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48... Read More

The science news this month was dominated by two genome stories. An organism's genome is the sum total of all its genetic information — its DNA. In sexually reproducing species, a child gets half its genome from one parent, half from the other. Asexual organisms like bacteria just copy DNA from one generation to the... Read More

Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley wrote a story titled "Protection" whose first-person protagonist acquires a guardian angel. The angel is actually a validusian derg — an invisible, immaterial being from another plane of existence, present only as a voice in one's head. The derg's sole satisfaction is to keep a human being safe from harm.... Read More

Michael Bloomberg, New York City's Mayor-for-Life, has announced that the city will not go ahead with a publicly-funded CCT program. A what? "CCT" stands for "Conditional Cash Transfer," the current fad among anti-poverty campaigners. The name, unusually for social-policy onomastics, clearly describes the program. Cash ($$$$) is transferred (from some funding source, most likely an... Read More

Third Thursday of the month, in season, is club night — the meeting, that is, of my gents' dinner club in New York City. We are a heterogeneous crowd: lawyers, doctors, writers, academics, a violinist, an ex-diplomat, some finance types. The club's been in business for decades. Bill Buckley was a member, showing up at... Read More

It is a commonplace observation that very smart people often have no sense. Writers since Aristophanes have been making sport of their intellectual superiors. Jonathan Swift had the academicians of Lagado striving to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Twenty years ago Paul Johnson wrote a fine book titled Intellectuals, in which he tossed and gored such... Read More

My breakfast-time reading matter of choice, the New York Post, has regular stories about long-separated friends, lovers, and family members who find one another via Google. Here's one: High School Sweethearts Rekindle Romance After 50 Years. The boy and girl were parted by a ruse of their parents, who disapproved. Half a century on, he... Read More

We — we, National Review — seem to have been talking a lot about exceptionalism this last couple of print issues. It started in the March 8 issue. The cover piece, by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, was a spirited defense of American exceptionalism, with some warnings about how the current administration's policies threaten it.... Read More

"All those years we thought we were building communism! Actually they've built communism right here in the U.S.A.!" This gets the biggest laugh of the evening. All seven of us in the room laugh, including me, the only non-Chinese. Someone quotes one of Chairman Mao's tremendous Thoughts, "We should pay close attention to the well-being... Read More

"The parking brake, honey. Parking brake." "Sorry, Dad." She releases the parking brake and we move out into our quiet suburban street. Signaling, she drives nicely to the corner, stops, looks, and makes a graceful turn in the direction of the village. Coming up to her 17th birthday, my daughter will soon take her driving... Read More

Thomas Friedman has been to China again, and seems to have experienced another Lincoln Steffens moment. More than one such, in fact. In his January 10 New York Times column Tom was swooning over the new high-speed rail link between Peking and Shanghai — five hours to cover 700 miles. "By comparison, Amtrak trains require... Read More

What shall I do to be saved? Well, I might try uploading the contents of my brain to some more durable substrate. If I survive another 30 years, this will be a real option, according to Ray Kurzweil, leading light of the Singularity movement. Singularitarians believe that galloping progress in computer technology and brain science... Read More

I find myself increasingly oppressed by the feeling that our big national policies are not merely mistaken, but deeply irrational. Take the president's recent "jobs summit." Like several other people — Pat Buchanan for example — I was baffled by the absence of any talk about limiting immigration. As Pat points out: Beats me, Pat;... Read More

Well, of course we all do trust science. We trust Bernoulli's Principle every time we get on a plane; we trust celestial mechanics when we take the kids outside to watch a scheduled lunar eclipse; we trust subatomic physics when we relax with an iPod; we trust the laws of chemistry every time we strike... Read More

So many things to know; so many points of view; so many disagreements, so many mishaps. Compared with home ownership, politics is a breeze. We are waiting for the driveway people to show up — the firm, I mean, that seals the surface of the driveway with a black rubberizing liquid. This is a 40-yard... Read More

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

I donated sperm a few years ago and couldn't believe how quickly my stuff "sold out."
California Cryobank was the company I used and they tend to end up with a lot of mystery meat jizz sitting around.
https://cryobank.com/search/?

Certainly the widespread use of hormonal birth control has effected mating choices in America. females on the pill are less likely to marry masculine men than females who avoided taking hormones to fake pregnancy.

Yeah, that too. But it officially becomes a war of all against all of the sort Wolfe describes when the losers realize they've been had, that virtually all public policy is essentially a scam to funnel money upwards to the (((financial sector))), and reform is impossible.

I need you to explain that. So there are say 35 million white Americans with IQs if 110 to 125 of whom 20 million are of working age. How many are unemployed or underemployed? Of those how many are affected by affirmative action (not H-1B I note: that's different) which gives jobs to blacks or...

I am feeling the love and abundance of our universe.
The transcendence of humanity is very near.
Whether through IQ uplift or AI Singularity, our quest to touch infinity is close.
It is such a high honor to be present to watch this transformation of our species to something magical.
I have n...

Can’t you complain about CNN? They put screens with CNN up in some of the university cafeterias the day after 9/11.
After a couple years no one could stand it anymore people complained and the screens. came down.
People have complained about CNN in dr offices and got them changed to natur...

There are tens of millions of White Americans with 110 to 125 IQs
All we need to do is end affirmative action so they can get jobs marry and have children.
As it is now, IQ skills etc don’t matter only race matters

The meat packers big farmers and chain restaurants have 8oo numbers plastered in villages all over Central America.
The villagers call the number and arrangements are made for them to be snuggled into the US and right to the workplace

Not really.
It was the unholy coalition of ambitious middle class commie Jews and black criminals that destroyed NYC Chicago parts of Los Angeles, Detroit Cleveland Philly on and on all our great cities. A satanic coalition of Jewish liberals and black criminals against the law abiding
...

Jim Garrison should have been disbarred for what he did to Clay Shaw. During the Cold War, virtually every American who traveled to soviet countries was debriefed by our intelligence agencies.
Saw the movie on TV. It was a hoot. The Garrison character never did mention a specific thing ...

Exactly. Fraudianism delayed the discovery of mental illness medication for 100 years. In another 100 years Dr Fraud will be just a paragraph in the history books.
Reason Dr Fraud put all the emphasis on sex is that he knew sex sells.

Freud was nothing Medical science has discovered medication to not really cure but alleviate the symptoms of mental illness to the point that it doesn’t affect the lives of those with mental illness.
His talk about your sex life cure wasn’t a cure at all. It was just a scam and a fraud. ...

Bauhaus to your house another one I loved because I hate loathe and despise 20 th century residential architecture and the horrible furniture the communist puritans designed to go in those horrible houses
I liked mau mauing the flak catcher because I was supposed to be a flak catcher. But I ...

You didn’t read the book did you?
First, the attack on Sherman wasn’t in Harlem It was in the Bronx on the way to Manhatten from the airport
Second the vicious thugs put a barricade of trash cans on the freeway on ramp for the purpose of stopping cars so they could rob the drivers ste...

Favorite Trollop novel is The Way We Live Now. Can’t stand those bishops and their wives novels especially Dorothea.
The CofE clergy made a good living and it was a prestige job, but what a way of life.

Actually, the 1880s big leap to America of Jews in Russia and adjacent territories was activated by granting civil liberties to Jews
Along with civil liberties came civil
responsibilities such as the draft from which Jews had previously been exempt.
It wasn’t progroms and anti semitisn ...

50 years ago it was 1968. Young women of that time were well-nourished but not fat. They grew their hair as long as they could get it, and long hair is a sexual attractor. The use of the pill was not very common in unmarried women at that time, so the average young women did not give off horm...

When the average male is revolted by the natural female body with unshaved pubes, no breast implants, no makeup, and with a few extra pounds, he's not going to breed children. You have to be attracted to this type of woman to become a father multiple times. There's no way to do it otherwise. T...

On the other hand, the heritability of leftism, at least as it expresses itself in today's current political climate, may change in the future. We may soon (or at least someday) have a supercomputer/AI that can tell us, with certainty, that some individuals and/or races have inferior or superior ...